Sunlight sang through the chick door's crack.
   And I heard her words,
         yet chose not to wake my brother,

He waited for her the last time
in the Cafe Eichberger, at their table:
walls the color of chocolate, tiles worn

You could be turning it in your fingers like a planet.
A knife would do, if you're good with knives,
bracing the hard fruit in your slender hand;

Though the rest of us remains closed, tired,
we go on hoping for what we know,
the essence of it enclosed in a dream—

No wonder the Antwerp teashops
refuse him—except with a heel of bread
through the back door. Held out

Sometimes I am so lonely the phone
will do.
Sometimes I am so lonely and you are not
dead, you

This couple strolling arm in arm
Must be figments of someone's revery.
They stop often to linger over a kiss,

As soon as he realized he was lost, that
in kicking around his new job in his head,
the new people he'd met, and how

 Smell the lilies and the columbine,
intoxicating rose, seductive lily-
of-the-valley, come smell! Can't they die?

                                1
To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited
landscape as far from nature as you can get
without actually leaving the planet, a man-made